OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Solving Text-based Games by Producing Adaptive Action Spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

To solve a text-based game, an agent needs to formulate valid text commands for a given context and find the ones that lead to success. Recent attempts at solving text-based games with deep reinforcement learning have focused on the latter, i.e., learning to act optimally when valid actions are known in advance. In this work, we propose to tackle the first task and train a model that generates the set of all valid commands for a given context. We try three generative models on a dataset generated with Textworld. The best model can generate valid commands which were unseen at training and achieve high $F_1$ score on the test set.
Collision-Free Multi Robot Trajectory Optimization in Unknown Environments using Decentralized Trajectory Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Multi robot systems have the potential to be utilized in a variety of applications. In most of the previous works, the trajectory generation for multi robot systems is implemented in known environments. To overcome that we present an online trajectory optimization algorithm that utilizes communication of robots' current states to account to the other robots while using local object based maps for identifying obstacles. Based upon this data, we predict the trajectory expected to be traversed by the robots and utilize that to avoid collisions by formulating regions of free space that the robot can be without colliding with other robots and obstacles. A trajectory is optimized constraining the robot to remain within this region.The proposed method is tested in simulations on Gazebo using ROS.
Joint Mapping and Calibration via Differentiable Sensor Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We leverage automatic differentiation (AD) and probabilistic programming to develop an end-to-end optimization algorithm for batch triangulation of a large number of unknown objects. Given noisy detections extracted from noisily geo-located street level imagery without depth information, we jointly estimate the number and location of objects of different types, together with parameters for sensor noise characteristics and prior distribution of objects conditioned on side information. The entire algorithm is framed as nested stochastic variational inference. An inner loop solves a soft data association problem via loopy belief propagation; a middle loop performs soft EM clustering using a regularized Newton solver (leveraging an AD framework); an outer loop backpropagates through the inner loops to train global parameters. We place priors over sensor parameters for different traffic object types, and demonstrate improvements with richer priors incorporating knowledge of the environment. We test our algorithm on detections of road signs observed by cars with mounted cameras, though in practice this technique can be used for any geo-tagged images. The detections were extracted by neural image detectors and classifiers, and we independently triangulate each type of sign (e.g. stop, traffic light). We find that our model is more robust to DNN misclassifications than current methods, generalizes across sign types, and can use geometric information to increase precision. Our algorithm outperforms our current production baseline based on k-means clustering. We show that variational inference training allows generalization by learning sign-specific parameters.
An Historical Analysis of the SEAndroid Policy Evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Android adopted SELinux's mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms in 2013. Since then, billions of Android devices have benefited from mandatory access control security policies. These policies are expressed in a variety of rules, maintained by Google and extended by Android OEMs. Over the years, the rules have grown to be quite complex, making it challenging to properly understand or configure these policies. In this paper, we perform a measurement study on the SEAndroid repository to understand the evolution of these policies. We propose a new metric to measure the complexity of the policy by expanding policy rules, with their abstraction features such as macros and groups, into primitive "boxes", which we then use to show that the complexity of the SEAndroid policies has been growing exponentially over time. By analyzing the Git commits, snapshot by snapshot, we are also able to analyze the "age" of policy rules, the trend of changes, and the contributor composition. We also look at hallmark events in Android's history, such as the "Stagefright" vulnerability in Android's media facilities, pointing out how these events led to changes in the MAC policies. The growing complexity of Android's mandatory policies suggests that we will eventually hit the limits of our ability to understand these policies, requiring new tools and techniques.
Online Graph-Adaptive Learning with Scalability and Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Graphs are widely adopted for modeling complex systems, including financial, biological, and social networks. Nodes in networks usually entail attributes, such as the age or gender of users in a social network. However, real-world networks can have very large size, and nodal attributes can be unavailable to a number of nodes, e.g., due to privacy concerns. Moreover, new nodes can emerge over time, which can necessitate real-time evaluation of their nodal attributes. In this context, the present paper deals with scalable learning of nodal attributes by estimating a nodal function based on noisy observations at a subset of nodes. A multikernel-based approach is developed which is scalable to large-size networks. Unlike most existing methods that re-solve the function estimation problem over all existing nodes whenever a new node joins the network, the novel method is capable of providing real-time evaluation of the function values on newly-joining nodes without resorting to a batch solver. Interestingly, the novel scheme only relies on an encrypted version of each node's connectivity in order to learn the nodal attributes, which promotes privacy. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Brain Tumor Segmentation using an Ensemble of 3D U-Nets and Overall Survival Prediction using Radiomic Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Accurate segmentation of different sub-regions of gliomas including peritumoral edema, necrotic core, enhancing and non-enhancing tumor core from multimodal MRI scans has important clinical relevance in diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of brain tumors. However, due to the highly heterogeneous appearance and shape, segmentation of the sub-regions is very challenging. Recent development using deep learning models has proved its effectiveness in the past several brain segmentation challenges as well as other semantic and medical image segmentation problems. Most models in brain tumor segmentation use a 2D/3D patch to predict the class label for the center voxel and variant patch sizes and scales are used to improve the model performance. However, it has low computation efficiency and also has limited receptive field. U-Net is a widely used network structure for end-to-end segmentation and can be used on the entire image or extracted patches to provide classification labels over the entire input voxels so that it is more efficient and expect to yield better performance with larger input size. Furthermore, instead of picking the best network structure, an ensemble of multiple models, trained on different dataset or different hyper-parameters, can generally improve the segmentation performance. In this study we propose to use an ensemble of 3D U-Nets with different hyper-parameters for brain tumor segmentation. Preliminary results showed effectiveness of this model. In addition, we developed a linear model for survival prediction using extracted imaging and non-imaging features, which, despite the simplicity, can effectively reduce overfitting and regression errors.
A Hybrid Instance-based Transfer Learning Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, supervised machine learning models have demonstrated tremendous success in a variety of application domains. Despite the promising results, these successful models are data hungry and their performance relies heavily on the size of training data. However, in many healthcare applications it is difficult to collect sufficiently large training datasets. Transfer learning can help overcome this issue by transferring the knowledge from readily available datasets (source) to a new dataset (target). In this work, we propose a hybrid instance-based transfer learning method that outperforms a set of baselines including state-of-the-art instance-based transfer learning approaches. Our method uses a probabilistic weighting strategy to fuse information from the source domain to the model learned in the target domain. Our method is generic, applicable to multiple source domains, and robust with respect to negative transfer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments for two different applications.
A Unified Approach to Dynamic Decision Problems with Asymmetric Information - Part I: Non-Strategic Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2018
Year: 2018

We study a general class of dynamic multi-agent decision problems with asymmetric information and non-strategic agents, which includes dynamic teams as a special case. When agents are non-strategic, an agent's strategy is known to the other agents. Nevertheless, the agents' strategy choices and beliefs are interdependent over times, a phenomenon known as signaling. We introduce the notions of private information that effectively compresses the agents' information in a mutually consistent manner. Based on the notions of sufficient information, we propose an information state for each agent that is sufficient for decision making purposes. We present instances of dynamic multi-agent decision problems where we can determine an information state with a time-invariant domain for each agent. Furthermore, we present a generalization of the policy-independence property of belief in Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) to dynamic multi-agent decision problems. Within the context of dynamic teams with asymmetric information, the proposed set of information states leads to a sequential decomposition that decouples the interdependence between the agents' strategies and beliefs over time, and enables us to formulate a dynamic program to determine a globally optimal policy via backward induction.
EENMF: An End-to-End Neural Matching Framework for E-Commerce Sponsored Search
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

E-commerce sponsored search contributes an important part of revenue for the e-commerce company. In consideration of effectiveness and efficiency, a large-scale sponsored search system commonly adopts a multi-stage architecture. We name these stages as ad retrieval, ad pre-ranking and ad ranking. Ad retrieval and ad pre-ranking are collectively referred to as ad matching in this paper. We propose an end-to-end neural matching framework (EENMF) to model two tasks---vector-based ad retrieval and neural networks based ad pre-ranking. Under the deep matching framework, vector-based ad retrieval harnesses user recent behavior sequence to retrieve relevant ad candidates without the constraint of keyword bidding. Simultaneously, the deep model is employed to perform the global pre-ranking of ad candidates from multiple retrieval paths effectively and efficiently. Besides, the proposed model tries to optimize the pointwise cross-entropy loss which is consistent with the objective of predict models in the ranking stage. We conduct extensive evaluation to validate the performance of the proposed framework. In the real traffic of a large-scale e-commerce sponsored search, the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline.
Sensorless Pose Determination using Randomized Action Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

This paper is a study of 2D manipulation without sensing and planning, by exploring the effects of unplanned randomized action sequences on 2D object pose uncertainty. Our approach follows the work of Erdmann and Mason's sensorless reorienting of an object into a completely determined pose, regardless of its initial pose. While Erdmann and Mason proposed a method using Newtonian mechanics, this paper shows that under some circumstances, a long enough sequence of random actions will also converge toward a determined final pose of the object. This is verified through several simulation and real robot experiments where randomized action sequences are shown to reduce entropy of the object pose distribution. The effects of varying object shapes, action sequences, and surface friction are also explored.
Walking on Thin Air: Environment-Free Physics-based Markerless Motion Capture
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a generative approach to physics-based motion capture. Unlike prior attempts to incorporate physics into tracking that assume the subject and scene geometry are calibrated and known a priori, our approach is automatic and online. This distinction is important since calibration of the environment is often difficult, especially for motions with props, uneven surfaces, or outdoor scenes. The use of physics in this context provides a natural framework to reason about contact and the plausibility of recovered motions. We propose a fast data-driven parametric body model, based on linear-blend skinning, which decouples deformations due to pose, anthropometrics and body shape. Pose (and shape) parameters are estimated using robust ICP optimization with physics-based dynamic priors that incorporate contact. Contact is estimated from torque trajectories and predictions of which contact points were active. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to take physics into account without explicit {\em a priori} knowledge of the environment or body dimensions. We demonstrate effective tracking from a noisy single depth camera, improving on state-of-the-art results quantitatively and producing better qualitative results, reducing visual artifacts like foot-skate and jitter.
Parameter Re-Initialization through Cyclical Batch Size Schedules
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Optimal parameter initialization remains a crucial problem for neural network training. A poor weight initialization may take longer to train and/or converge to sub-optimal solutions. Here, we propose a method of weight re-initialization by repeated annealing and injection of noise in the training process. We implement this through a cyclical batch size schedule motivated by a Bayesian perspective of neural network training. We evaluate our methods through extensive experiments on tasks in language modeling, natural language inference, and image classification. We demonstrate the ability of our method to improve language modeling performance by up to 7.91 perplexity and reduce training iterations by up to $61\%$, in addition to its flexibility in enabling snapshot ensembling and use with adversarial training.
Time-Sequence Channel Inference for Beam Alignment in Vehicular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a learning-based low-overhead beam alignment method for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in vehicular networks. The main idea is to remotely infer the optimal beam directions at a target base station in future time slots, based on the CSI of a source base station in previous time slots. The proposed scheme can reduce channel acquisition and beam training overhead by replacing pilot-aided beam training with online inference from a sequence-to-sequence neural network. Simulation results based on ray-tracing channel data show that our proposed scheme achieves a $8.86\%$ improvement over location-based beamforming schemes with a positioning error of $1$m, and is within a $4.93\%$ performance loss compared with the genie-aided optimal beamformer.
Design and implementation of smart cooking based on amazon echo
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Smart cooking based on Amazon Echo uses the internet of things and cloud computing to assist in cooking food. People may speak to Amazon Echo during the cooking in order to get the information and situation of the cooking. Amazon Echo recognizes what people say, then transfers the information to the cloud services, and speaks to people the results that cloud services make by querying the embedded cooking knowledge and achieving the information of intelligent kitchen devices online. An intelligent food thermometer and its mobile application are well-designed and implemented to monitor the temperature of cooking food.
A multi-class structured dictionary learning method using discriminant atom selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In the last decade, traditional dictionary learning methods have been successfully applied to various pattern classification tasks. Although these methods produce sparse representations of signals which are robust against distortions and missing data, such representations quite often turn out to be unsuitable if the final objective is signal classification. In order to overcome or at least to attenuate such a weakness, several new methods which incorporate discriminative information into sparse-inducing models have emerged in recent years. In particular, methods for discriminative dictionary learning have shown to be more accurate (in terms of signal classification) than the traditional ones, which are only focused on minimizing the total representation error. In this work, we present both a novel multi-class discriminative measure and an innovative dictionary learning method. For a given dictionary, this new measure, which takes into account not only when a particular atom is used for representing signals coming from a certain class and the magnitude of its corresponding representation coefficient, but also the effect that such an atom has in the total representation error, is capable of efficiently quantifying the degree of discriminability of each one of the atoms. On the other hand, the new dictionary construction method yields dictionaries which are highly suitable for multi-class classification tasks. Our method was tested with a widely used database for handwritten digit recognition and compared with three state-of-the-art classification methods. The results show that our method significantly outperforms the other three achieving good recognition rates and additionally, reducing the computational cost of the classifier.
Matrix Factorization via Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Matrix completion is one of the key problems in signal processing and machine learning. In recent years, deep-learning-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results in matrix completion. Nevertheless, they suffer from two drawbacks: (i) they can not be extended easily to rows or columns unseen during training; and (ii) their results are often degraded in case discrete predictions are required. This paper addresses these two drawbacks by presenting a deep matrix factorization model and a generic method to allow joint training of the factorization model and the discretization operator. Experiments on a real movie rating dataset show the efficacy of the proposed models.
A System for Efficient Communication between Patients and Pharmacies
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

When studying human-technology interaction systems, researchers thrive to achieve intuitiveness and facilitate the people's life through a thoughtful and in-depth study of several components of the application system that supports some particular business communication with customers. Particularly in the healthcare field, some requirements such as clarity, transparency, efficiency, and speed in transmitting information to patients and or healthcare professionals might mean an important increase in the well-being of the patient and productivity of the healthcare professional. In this work, the authors study the difficulties patients frequently have when communicating with pharmacists. In addition to a statistical study of a survey conducted with more than two hundred frequent pharmacy customers, we propose an IT solution for better communication between patients and pharmacists.
A Parallel Double Greedy Algorithm for Submodular Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We study parallel algorithms for the problem of maximizing a non-negative submodular function. Our main result is an algorithm that achieves a nearly-optimal $1/2 -ε$ approximation using $O(\log(1/ε) / ε)$ parallel rounds of function evaluations. Our algorithm is based on a continuous variant of the double greedy algorithm of Buchbinder et al. that achieves the optimal $1/2$ approximation in the sequential setting. Our algorithm applies more generally to the problem of maximizing a continuous diminishing-returns (DR) function.
Skyline Diagram: Efficient Space Partitioning for Skyline Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

Skyline queries are important in many application domains. In this paper, we propose a novel structure Skyline Diagram, which given a set of points, partitions the plane into a set of regions, referred to as skyline polyominos. All query points in the same skyline polyomino have the same skyline query results. Similar to $k^{th}$-order Voronoi diagram commonly used to facilitate $k$ nearest neighbor ($k$NN) queries, skyline diagram can be used to facilitate skyline queries and many other applications. However, it may be computationally expensive to build the skyline diagram. By exploiting some interesting properties of skyline, we present several efficient algorithms for building the diagram with respect to three kinds of skyline queries, quadrant, global, and dynamic skylines. In addition, we propose an approximate skyline diagram which can significantly reduce the space cost. Experimental results on both real and synthetic datasets show that our algorithms are efficient and scalable.
Auto-tuning TensorFlow Threading Model for CPU Backend
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

TensorFlow is a popular deep learning framework used by data scientists to solve a wide-range of machine learning and deep learning problems such as image classification and speech recognition. It also operates at a large scale and in heterogeneous environments --- it allows users to train neural network models or deploy them for inference using GPUs, CPUs and deep learning specific custom-designed hardware such as TPUs. Even though TensorFlow supports a variety of optimized backends, realizing the best performance using a backend may require additional efforts. For instance, getting the best performance from a CPU backend requires careful tuning of its threading model. Unfortunately, the best tuning approach used today is manual, tedious, time-consuming, and, more importantly, may not guarantee the best performance. In this paper, we develop an automatic approach, called TensorTuner, to search for optimal parameter settings of TensorFlow's threading model for CPU backends. We evaluate TensorTuner on both Eigen and Intel's MKL CPU backends using a set of neural networks from TensorFlow's benchmarking suite. Our evaluation results demonstrate that the parameter settings found by TensorTuner produce 2% to 123% performance improvement for the Eigen CPU backend and 1.5% to 28% performance improvement for the MKL CPU backend over the performance obtained using their best-known parameter settings. This highlights the fact that the default parameter settings in Eigen CPU backend are not the ideal settings; and even for a carefully hand-tuned MKL backend, the settings may be sub-optimal. Our evaluations also revealed that TensorTuner is efficient at finding the optimal settings --- it is able to converge to the optimal settings quickly by pruning more than 90% of the parameter search space.